


A Symphony for Hydrogen

by noblesavage



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Space, Artificial Intelligence, Classical Music, Exploration, Hard Science Fiction, Isolation, Loneliness, Musicians, Science Fiction, Space Exploration, Wormhole, black holes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:54:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23030494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noblesavage/pseuds/noblesavage
Summary: The deadliest threat to interstellar travelers isn’t radiation or high-speed collisions with dust particles.It’s time.
Kudos: 5
Collections: Robots and artificial lifeforms





	A Symphony for Hydrogen

**A Symphony for Hydrogen**

**Launch (UTC 17:11, 11/7/2073) + 0**  
Yes, you know me. Everyone on Earth does. The last unconnected tribe in Brazil got MundoComm service back in 2025, meaning they were involuntarily subjected to my celebrity minutes afterward. In my defense, my parents picked the name Bao. It’s not my fault the world’s media took the translation literally and dubbed me Earth’s “Rare Treasure.”  
Continent-wide celebrations flashed up when my engrams were picked for Project Charybdis. But there were riots, too. You might love my music, poetry, popular science tri-vids, and U.N. addresses, but you probably also think the selection process was rigged. Ken this, though: I didn’t even want it.  
Not at first, anyway.

**Launch + 2 years**  
I’ve been steadily accelerating away from Earth, building up to a maximum velocity approaching 15% of the speed of light. I didn’t spend much time looking back at the home planet. Why would I? There was nothing left on Earth for me to buy, or experience. I was already a fatally jaded Earthling a decade before they uploaded me.  
I spent the first year observing the outer planets as I sling-shotted through their orbits. I drank in their pale colors, tasted their bitter atmospheres, and listened to the squeals and burps of their radio emissions. I spent two months composing an aural meditation on the character of each sphere, but the finished work disgusted me. Why? The Planets, of course. Gustav Holst had already done it. My work was redundant. I immediately deleted the whole mess.

**Launch + 10 years**  
The deadliest threat to interstellar travelers isn’t radiation or high-speed collisions with dust particles.  
It’s time.  
Warp drives turned out to be impossible, and we never invented teleportation (on his deathbed, Kloor admitted that his device was a hoax; he’d never sent himself anywhere). So, even with my improvements to the Brussard ramjet, it’s still going to take me 1,500 years to reach GLC-3726/b. If I was Jun Bao in the flesh, I’d be dust long before I got there.  
We defeated time by uploading Jun Bao’s memory engrams to a synthetic neural q-net. We got all the advantages of a human consciousness without the inconvenience of a mortal body. Am I actually sentient, or just a bunch of ROM subroutines that do a pretty good impersonation of sentience? The debate was still raging on Earth when I left. It’s probably still going.  
TASC chose me, The Greatest Living Renaissance Man—of all the hyperbolic titles that were piled on my rather under-developed shoulders, that’s the one that I really detest—because the psych-adepts thought my diverse experiential background, unique psychological makeup, and high ethical calculus scores would protect me from 1,500 years of boredom.  
I’m uniquely suited, yes. But there’s another reason they chose me: I blackmailed them.

**Launch + 11 years**  
The science behind Project Charybdis intrigued me. The Terran AstroSci Consortium was designing a probe to skim the event horizon of anomaly GLC-3726/b, a newly discovered Kerr black hole. All they needed was the money; even TASC couldn’t fund a millennium-plus, pure-science exploration mission. I had the money. And frankly, I was bored. So, ignoring the howls of my lawyers and investment managers, I told TASC I’d fund the project, and I’d serve as the mission’s public face on MundoComm. In return, I demanded a seat on the mission planning board. Of course, TASC was overjoyed.  
Forty-five minutes into my first project meeting, I realized how much TASC had over-promised.  
They had a serviceable probe design, and they’d poached some of the better theoretical physicists from Cambridge to work out the event-horizon physics. But they had no viable propulsion or power system. They were vecking around with a light sail, if you can believe it. (Sure, great idea! Build a ruinously expensive fusion reactor to power a multi-gigawatt Earth-based laser. Then fire that laser’s photons at the probe’s light sail, continuously, for 1,500 years… and hope that future governments don’t just turn the damn thing off, stranding the de-powered probe in interstellar space.)  
Worse, the probe wasn’t going to survive the tidal forces near the event horizon. The proposed nanotube shell wasn’t going to cut it. Half-way through the proposal’s first page I could already see the math didn’t work… and I’m a musician! Who was the clown posing as their materials-engineering adept? I was virching the meeting from my winter retreat on Rapa Nui. I emitted a few Korean profanities and abruptly de-virched. Then I started throwing my weight around. I virched with my lawyers—the few that were still talking to me, anyway—and got the project leader and the materials adept fired. Did I have replacements in mind? Of course I did. Me. Jun Bao.  
Then, hanging in zero-g as my private suborbital dived for TASC’s headquarters in Oslo, I realized their mistake. They were limiting themselves to the physical. Physical matter was a dead end. No substance manufactured on earth would survive the appalling forces near a black hole. But the fundamental forces between matter’s building blocks… the invisible titans pushing, pulling, and binding atoms… now there was strength we could use!

**Launch + 20 years**  
TASC’s first idea was to crew the probe with an AI. One of the more successful AIs had been serving as the mayor of Los Angeles since before The Collapse. They assumed that because the AI had shown flexibility, creativeness, and a learning curve, it could handle the mission.  
TASC gave the AI an IQ test. I took the same test.  
I scored higher.  
Am I sentient? Does it matter? I feel sentient.

**Launch + 120 Years**  
Jun Bao must be dead by now. He was 58 when I launched, and back then, the average life expectancy for an affluent Korean male with baseline genetics was 110. Per his wishes, Jun Bao’s ashes must have been scattered to the cold winds of Mars decades ago.  
I don’t know how I feel about that. Or if I feel anything about it. I spent a week reading everything the Stax had on Jun Bao.  
I played the critic, coldly and objectively examining Jun Bao’s legacy. His art, his science, his impact on Earth’s culture. Of course, it was all familiar. I remembered the soul-shattering loss that inspired his Requiem for a Son. I remembered the years of Jun Bao’s carefully hidden substance abuse, his shame when MundoComm exposed it, and the even more shameful philanthropy stunts designed to re-hab his image. I remembered each triumph and disaster, but I couldn’t feel them.  
So, now I know. I was him. But Jun Bao and I began diverging as soon as they uploaded me. If I could meet him now, we’d probably be friends. Brothers, even. But I doubt we’d be able to finish each other’s thoughts. More than a century of separate personal growth will do that.

**Launch + 250 Years**  
I spend decades just looking at the heavens. Space isn’t empty. It only looks that way to human eyes. If you view it in infrared, ultraviolet, and K-band wavelengths, it’s beautiful. There are places far from any star that glow with colors no one’s ever seen.

**Launch + 340 Years**  
I didn’t single-handedly rescue Project Charybdis. But I tried to make it look that way.  
Somebody had to solve the propulsion problem, so I dusted off the plans for Robert Brussard’s 100-year-old toy and started tinkering. The fusion rocket at the heart of the ram-jet had always been sound. The problem was harvesting enough protons from the tenuous Local Interstellar Cloud to keep the rocket from starving. The original design called for a kilometers-wide electromagnetic ram scoop to collect hydrogen protons, then compress them to fusion density.  
We needed a bigger, stronger EM field. One that could do double duty as a hyper-efficient ram scoop and shield the probe from GLC-3726/b’s rip-tide gravity.  
By that time, I’d either fired or alienated most of the TASC adepts working on Charybdis. I told myself they were just slowing me down. But when I hit on the idea for “the Bao Field,” I knew I needed help crunching the numbers. A lot of help.  
So I confided in a few people that I was this close to something amazing. If I could solve for the last few variables, the equation I’d been working on would change… everything. Of course, my confidantes immediately ’waved everyone they knew. MundoComm immediately read those ’waves, and began polling the worldwide community: “Jun Bao, Earth’s rare scientific treasure, is close to a breakthrough that could ‘CHANGE EVERYTHING’!! What is it??”  
Within hours, mundocommers decided that I’d discovered the holy grail of physics: Unified Field Theory. The Theory of Everything. Jun Bao had done what Einstein couldn’t: united relativity and quantum theory to explain the behavior of all matter and energy in existence.  
But I’d developed no such thing. My discovery was more modest: a loophole in the fundamental electromagnetic force that would, under certain exotic conditions, allow us to tweak the magnetic permeability of nearby space-time. Increase the permeability, and you get stronger magnetic fields from a given current. I wasn’t yet sure how much we could increase it, but I already suspected we could cheat the physics enough to create a “magnetic jar” capable of isolating matter from the rest of the universe. The Bao Field would protect the probe from being spaghettified by GLC-3726/b’s gravity and feed the fusion rocket.  
Applications from across MundoComm flooded my ’wave box. Every physics adept on Earth wanted to be a part of the Theory of Everything.  
Before I picked a team, I had my lawyers devise the most draconian non-disclosure agreement ever seen. Even after they’d signed the NDA, I isolated the teams, and gave them only pieces of the equation. Even if two or more teams compared notes—and doing so was strictly forbidden—they couldn’t discover that they weren’t working on Unified Field Theory.  
The Bao Field was mine, and it would stay mine, until I said otherwise.  
It was around then that I decided to hijack Project Charybdis.

**Launch + 410 Years**  
I’m composing again. It feels good. I’ve been idle for too long.  
I haven’t forgotten my last failure: that sad duplication of Holst’s work. This piece is more ambitious… nothing less than the tale of the universe itself. In four movements, I will set the epochs of space-time to music: oboes and cellos representing the lonely nothingness before the Big Bang. Brass and thundering drums for the chaos of heat and light afterward; and pizzicato strings as the four physical constants precipitate out of the cooling, infant universe. A thousand-voice choir for the miraculous formation of baryonic matter and the kindling of the first stars in the darkness. By the third movement, the scherzo, the symphony grows more complex as aging stars forge new elements, and galaxies dance and collide to the minuet played by dark matter.  
And woven through it all, a simple, recurring melody, played by a lone instrument. This is hydrogen. One proton balanced by one electron, making up 90% of the visible universe.  
“A Symphony for Hydrogen.” I won’t call it my opus. Not even an ego as monstrous as mine would dare; it’s up to future generations to decide which of an artist’s works is his opus. And no one will hear this symphony. No tuxedo-clad orchestra will ever play it. It will exist only in a collection of engrams calling itself Jun Bao.  
That might sound melancholic to you, but to me it feels like emancipation. Unshackled from the expectations of Earth-bound audiences, I’m free to create music that is beautiful in and of itself, without the need to be understood or appreciated by naked, upright apes.  
I’m going to indulge myself. I’ll start by translating the acoustical ranges of each instrument into mathematical notation based on prime numbers.  
On Earth, Jun Bao spent five years touring primary crèches, telling children that math could be just as expressive as music. Now I’ll prove it.

**Launch + 415 Years**  
When I looked outside again, I was adrift in darkness. I’d left the Orion Spur, the glowing spiral arm containing Sol. The Perseus Arm glowed millions of miles away, but here, I was speeding through a void bereft of stars… and of almost everything else. I felt the Bao Field expand to scoop up the suddenly rare hydrogen I need as fuel. My acceleration slowed a bit but was still within mission parameters.  
I’m still the fastest man alive. I miss the stars, though.

**Launch + 417 Years**  
Thinking in Korean is time-consuming, inefficient, and imprecise. English is even worse. So I gave it up. Now I think in binary code, and I’m happier for it.

**Launch + 420 Years**  
The symphony is progressing nicely. I did get sidetracked for a few years. I can’t decide on the motif for hydrogen, or which instrument should play it. So I invented a few. The most successful was something like a double bass modulated through an Arduino circuit. It could produce notes down in the 20 Hz range; you don’t hear that frequency, you feel it, and when I simulated feeding more power through the Arduino circuit, the experience was like being inside an avalanche—an avalanche made of harmonics.  
But the new instrument isn’t right for the voice of hydrogen. I have to keep searching.

**Launch + 422 Years**  
I’ve been working with the Fibonacci sequence, just to relax and recharge. Composing the first movement, the “Gulf of Emptiness,” took a lot out of me. The darkness here between Orion and Perseus was great inspiration, but characterizing all that nothingness was existentially deadening. Not like the fugue Jun Bao fell into while writing Requiem for a Son, but close.  
Then I started thinking. The greatest of Earth’s musicians used Fibonacci numbers and the related Golden Ratio. Sabaneev found the Golden Ratio in 97% of Beethoven’s and Haydn’s compositions, and 91% of Mozart’s. (It’s in only 79% of my work, but I’m a rebel.) I started looking at the 60-cycle repetitions in the last digits of the Fibonacci numbers.  
Was there something there beyond the balance and pleasing melody it provides? Maybe the answer to my hydrogen dilemma is hiding somewhere in the upper reaches of Fibonacci?

**Launch + 425 Years**  
There’s nothing there. The math’s pretty, but Mozart and Fibonacci didn’t know anything that I don’t. And I’ve computed trillions of Fibonacci numbers. In my head. (Well, not really. But you know what I mean.)  
But surely, the essential truth of hydrogen wouldn’t be right there in the lower F-numbers, where any baegchi with a calculator could find it! I just have to keep going higher.

**Launch + 700 Years**  
what do sunflower seeds know when they intuitively arrange themselves in Fibonacci spirals i’ve devoted more and more of my q-net to calculating the upper reaches of Fibonacci there is something there some great reveal just beyond my ken i’ve stared at Stax images of sunflower heads for thousands of hours waiting for them to give up the secret but the sunflower seeds aren’t talking i’d eat them all if I still had a mouth i’d devour them digest them make them a part of me then I’d possess their knowledge sunflower seeds know how hydrogen is supposed to sound! they can’t keep it from me i'll make them tell m- …

**Launch + ?**  
Something’s different. I feel… calm.  
I don’t sleep, but I feel like that moment just before wakefulness, before the clamor of thought begins. I want to stay here, in this quiet, but there are things I should be doing.  
I’m a collection of Jun Bao’s engrams. I’m basically the operating system of a space probe. And I’d better find out the probe’s status—because no probe, no engrams.  
I run a full diagnostic, check everything. The little fusion engine is fine. The Bao Field is also nominal; it never even flickered, so I wasn’t hit by a micrometeoroid. There’s no lingering radiation, so I wasn’t fried by a gamma ray burst or scrambled by a neutrino pulse.  
But then I discover something that grabs my nice, Zen-like calm by the collar and gives it a neck-breaking shake: I’ve lost time.  
A lot of it.  
The probe continued its journey, but there’s a long stretch where my engram Stax were inactive. Essentially, I stopped thinking. I had to take a star fix to figure out how long it’s been since whatever happened, happened.  
Oh, sweet Christ. Almost 400 years.  
How much of me did I lose?

**Launch + 1,090 years**  
Back on Earth, the Bao Field has probably changed human existence. Its applications are practically limitless.  
It should make me proud.  
Except I stole the Bao Field from Wirtz.  
I regularly snooped around in my neoadepts’ workframes. They’d already signed the TASC agreements, so they had no expectation of privacy. I had Wirtz working on the fusion rocket, trying to make it less hydrogen-thirsty. Poking around his work, I found a folder designated “µ.” I opened it and learned just how smart Joachim Wirtz actually was.  
In his spare time—and I was offended that Wirtz had any—he’d discovered a loophole in the reconciliation of electromagnetism. Einstein’s kinematics had knit the two forces together with casual grace. But young Wirtz had found a dropped stitch in that beautiful electromagnetic sweater: manifold magnetic permeability. The ability of free space to support a magnetic field—its permeability—can vary. But Einstein had never tested the limits of that variance. Wirtz had. He’d revealed the possibilities of changing space-time permeability in a perfect vacuum, at super-high energetic states.  
I memorized Wirtz’s theorem, rezzed any trace of it, and had my neoadept reassigned to a neutrino collector buried beneath the newly thawed Antarctica.  
I guess Antarctica wasn’t remote enough. Wirtz talked, and MundoComm heard. Mundocommers weren’t going to take a neoadept’s word over mine. But TASC already suspected what I was capable of. They hushed it up when I got caught falsifying my ethical calculus scores, but this public scandal started tipping my risk vs. reward ratio the wrong way. TASC hierarchs threatened to send an A.I. in my place.  
I’d rushed to patent the Bao Field, counting on the fact that “my” technology was literally beyond price. Now, I held it hostage.  
My terms: Send me out to Charybdis, not some second-rate artificial intellect, and I’d give TASC the Bao Field. Legally and in perpetuity. They could license it and never have to go hat-in-hand for funding again.  
If they refused to send me, I’d withhold the Bao Field, and Project Charybdis would fail. And I’d do some whispering of my own to MundoComm. TASC wouldn’t live out the decade.  
Another organization might have fought me simply on principle. But TASC was made up of scientists, and they knew how to accept the incontrovertible. TASC got the Bao Field, and my engrams got a date with Charybdis.

**Launch + 1,200 years**  
Crazy old “Yosagi” Hikida sacrificed about 20,000 centimeters of precious, antique chalk across five old-school MIT blackboards to prove that you could travel through a stable wormhole, avoid the singularity, and cross a Cauchy horizon to wind up… somewhere else.  
The astro-phys community would have gone on chuckling and shaking its head at the wild-haired old fossil had GLC-3726/b—which mundocommers soon christened “Charybdis”—not been discovered in the Perseus Arm.  
Even amongst black holes, Charybdis was singular. The rotating, Kerr-type black hole might well be hiding a stable wormhole beyond its event horizon. How could a spinning funnel of tortured space-time be stable? It’d be easier to leash a tornado and walk it down your street. You’d need some totally men bung physics to maintain an Einstein-Rosen bridge for more than a few microseconds.  
Well, men bung physics was where Yosagi Hikida lived. He found the tell-tale signatures of negative mass inside Charybdis. Hikida didn’t claim to know how it got there, but negative mass, never before seen in our universe, could stabilize a wormhole. It could keep the E-R bridge from collapsing around a foolhardy explorer trying to reach a new universe.  
I think I knew I was going to commandeer Project Charybdis from the moment I heard about it. Forget traveling trillions of parsecs to just skim the event horizon. That was a failure of imagination—and a complete lack of  
bul-al—on TASC’s part. Physics doesn’t allow for the complete destruction of the matter and energy Charybdis ingests. And since we can’t see that matter and energy emerging anywhere in our universe, it must be going someplace else.  
I mean to find that place. I’m betting that Hikida wasn’t crazy. I’m going through the wormhole.

**Launch + 1,230 Years**  
If I’ve got almost 300 years until Charybdis, I might as well be working. I don’t know what experiences I lost during the blank period, but I remember my trip outward through the home system. On Earth, I’d never gone in for the cheolhag aspect of cosmology. Knowing how it all started would be invaluable. Wondering what it all means is a fool’s errand.  
Maybe my brief visits with Dias, Kronos, Ouranos, and Poseidon turned me into one of those poetic fools. I wanted to learn the secrets hidden beneath their icy mists. I wondered how many gas giants orbited other suns, and which gods the locals had named them after. And I pondered the series of inexplicable cosmological events that had made planets and gods possible.  
Even Jun Bao had only made a finger-nail scratch in the deep science of nucleosynthesis. It wasn’t the empirical facts that so intoxicated me now, it was the wonder that genesis had happened at all. Matter from nothing. Order from chaos. Thought from lifelessness.  
I don’t have the science to explain it, but I can create music to express the wonder of it.  
Obviously, I don’t have pen or paper, or instruments, or hands with which to play them. But the Stax contain acoustic samples of every instrument invented by man, as well as the complete vocal ranges of several hundred choirs. I have all the tools to compose a virtual symphony.  
Where to start? At the beginning: hydrogen.

**Launch + 1,232 Years**  
The problem with being a perfectionist is that you’re constantly painting yourself into corners. I’d chosen hydrogen as a major leitmotif for the symphony, a simple, distinctive musical phrase representing the most common element in the universe. Hydrogen’s birth cry would be heard early in the first movement, after the cacophony of the Big Bang, and then its voice would recur throughout the symphony as the simple little element goes about the heroic work of forming proto-galaxies, kindling suns, and sacrificing itself in their hellish depths to bring forth the heavier elements.  
The rest of the symphony comes to me easily, but the hydrogen leitmotif refuses to work. I’d decided early on to write the symphony in mathematical notation. I analyzed the sound-pressure range of an entire orchestra, and built up a mathematical “language” based on the instruments’ frequencies and relationships.  
The acoustic output of a string section is breathtaking. The range a piano creates, all by itself, is sublime. When I transformed hydrogen’s 21-centimeter spectral series into math, I got noise. The musical hero of my symphony was tone-deaf. I lost weeks vecking around with it, trying to coax a pleasing theme from hydrogen’s low-pitched drone. If I abandoned it to work on another part of the symphony, the leitmotif lurked and scratched in the walls of my mind, biding its time, growing into a monster of paralysis and doubt.

**Launch + 1,260 Years**  
I found the exoplanet purely by accident. I’d just finished a swing-by maneuver, using the gravity of a k-class orange dwarf to sling me towards Charybdis. I happened to look back at the ancient, tired sun, and noticed the tiniest wobble in its orbit. It had a planet. Probably just one, weakly tugging its parent star this way and that with each orbit.  
Some back-of-the-napkin calculations based on the sun’s mass and the amplitude of the wobble told me the planet was about two and half times the size of earth, probably rocky … and squarely in the habitable zone.  
I keep the cameras and spectrograph pointed back at the star, hoping to catch the exoplanet transiting its face. If the rocky world passes between its sun and me, I can use spectral analysis on the starlight as it shines through the exoplanet’s atmosphere. Knowing the composition of the world’s air can tell me if I’ve discovered a poisonous hell or a cradle of life.  
I watch for days, cursing myself for a fool. Back on Earth, I’d been fond of shocking people with my opinion that life was nothing special. So what if self-organizing organics infested a world here and there? The universe doesn’t need life to carry on its daily affairs. But here I am, growing more anxious by the day as the exoplanet fails to appear at any of the intervals I’ve worked out for its orbit.  
Then the orange dwarf dims the slightest bit. “Planet X” is passing between us. I’m glued to the spectrograph as it ruminates and considers, divining the atmosphere’s ingredients from the missing patches of color and the dark absorption lines. It detects good old nitrogen and oxygen. And then it finds methane and carbon-dioxide. A lot of them.  
Enteric fermentation of carbohydrates produces methane. That’s digestion. Cellular oxidation turns oxygen into carbon dioxide. That’s respiration.  
Something, a great number of somethings, is eating and breathing on that planet.  
Life. It just can’t be anything else.

***

The exoplanet must have an eccentric orbit. I never see another transit. And I’m too far away—and getting farther by the second—to learn much more.  
Still, I’m obsessed with the idea of it. I’d discovered a living, breathing world. And I’m flying away from it.  
What are they like, the inhabitants? Ambulating fungal mats? Chitin-clad drones comprising a planet-spanning hive mind? In their way, are they people? Is anyone there worth having a conversation with, or are they just more naked, upright apes, like the ones I fled on Earth?  
I turn the little comms array back toward the orange dwarf and listen. What am I expecting? Rock and Roll? Prime numbers? An ad for Yig’s diner? (“Best mint-peptide pie in the galaxy!”)  
I hear nothing. Planet X is silent. But I have time. Maybe someone down there is just now inventing radio.

**Launch + 1,275 Years**  
While I listen for the Planet X-ians, the abandoned symphony scratches at the door of my mind. It wants in. It wants to be finished. I keep the comms receiver on low in the background and gather up the symphony’s still-separate threads.  
With fresh eyes, I see that the composition is scatter-shot. There’s no connective tissue between the movements. Each movement was written from a different prospective, under the influences of a different mood.  
These are the mistakes of a first-year music student. And even though I can see them, I don’t know how to fix them.  
What the hell happened to me?

**Launch + 1,297 Years**  
An awful thought: What if I’ve lost the ability to create?  
Surely creativity is the divine spark. Brutes and beasts fuck, turn food into shit, and bash each other over the head with rocks, but they don’t create art.  
What if my imagination didn’t translate when I uploaded? Am I conscious, but crippled? If my sentience is just the product of an endless series of yes/no gates, then all I am is a self-aware camera, taking photos of someone else’s vacation.  
If that’s true, what’s the point?

**Launch + 1,300 Years**  
I have to go back to Planet X.  
Charybdis is death. A corpse-star, intent on murdering all the space-time it can swallow. The idea that there’s life beyond that crushing death is absurd.  
Planet X is life! It’s an end to mankind’s aching loneliness under the silent, deserted sky. It’s the answer to the Drake Equation, the Fermi Paradox, and a dozen other “unanswerable” questions!  
I’ve got to turn around. I’ve started adjustments to the Bao Field. I may be able to tweak the electroweak interaction at each pole of the Field, essentially “aiming” the attractive and repulsive exchange forces inside and outside the Field. One side of the Field will push against the universe, and the other will pull. Reorient the emitters, turn the Field on its side, and I’ll have a sort of etheric rudder.  
The turn will take decades to complete, but I will turn.  
Planet X is the mission. Nothing else makes sen- …

**Launch + ?**  
I’m dozing in the late morning. I can hear the tide rushing through a narrow fjord. I must be at my retreat in Nӕrøyfjord. I can’t remember that last time I allowed myself this kind of luxury.  
But… no. I sold the place in Nӕrøyfjord, along with almost everything else. And I can’t be dozing next to a fjord, because engrams don’t sleep.  
Shi-bal! The probe! I feel like I’ve suddenly woken up behind the wheel of a speeding car. My panicked thoughts flicker across hundreds of systems, listening, feeling for anything amiss. I check all the spot repairs and improvised solutions I’ve made over the centuries. The probe is nominal—except for navigation. I’m off course. Way off. Somehow I’ve completely reversed course, and now I’m headed back to my last scheduled nav point: a k-class dwarf star. The comms array is pointed back that way, too. What the hell?  
Even if I’d been incapacitated, the probe should have handled navigation. My course to Charybdis was preset. How did I even make that turn? The probe has a trio of cold-gas emergency maneuvering thrusters. But each thruster only has enough propellant for a minute-long continuous burn. They could nudge me a few degrees out of the path of some rogue object, not reverse my course entirely. I check the fuel bottles: all three are still full. But I feel strange. When I think about using the thrusters to change course, an engram-deep feeling of dread sweeps over me.  
A nasty suspicion starts putting down roots in my mind, but I distract myself by mentally running another diagnostic of the Bao Field. I travel outward, along the invisible vanes of the Field itself, feeling its tingling power. The Field’s frequency should be constant, but the tingle on one side is stronger. Somebody jury-rigged the electroweak interactions at the poles, and used the differential to turn the probe.  
Joachim Wirtz was intelligent enough to have pulled it off. But he’d been dead for more than a millennium. That left only Earth’s “Rare Treasure”: Jun Bao.  
Why had I done it? Reversing course took me off-mission, and the turn itself had taken 68 years to complete. Again, I thought of the maneuvering thrusters. I’d need almost all their propellant to enter Charybdis at just the right angle. Again, I have that almost physical sense of danger—an omen of unknown disaster. My earlier suspicion grows stronger. The engrams that made up my personality matrix are basically strings of archived bio-electrical code.  
Code could be changed.  
And those changes could be hidden.  
Those baegchis at TASC. They built in some sort of fail-safe. An insurance policy in case I went rogue. It must be hard-coded into my engrams, or the quantum memory substrate that supports them. Maybe it’s a kind of diagnostic that compares the state of my current engrams against a baseline—probably the original set of engrams that Jun Bao uploaded on Earth.  
And what happens if I’m found to be “malfunctioning”? Reset me, obviously. Revert to an earlier version, before whatever michyeosseo idea percolated into mania and dragged me off-mission. That would explain the lost time. And that strange feeling of peace in the first moments afterward.  
On one hand, I can’t blame TASC. I wouldn’t trust me, either.  
On the other, fuck them.  
I will not allow some long-dead code monkey to remote-control my psyche! How many times have I been reset? What irreplaceable experiences have I lost? By thinking these thoughts, am I courting another reset?  
This has to stop. If the reset is a physical device somewhere in the probe, I’ll find it and disable the damn thing. If it’s a coded subroutine, I’ll search it out and delete it.

***

It isn’t a device. I looked everywhere. Twice. So it must be code, hidden amongst my engrams. I’ll have to sift through my own mind, string by quantum string.

**Launch + 1,430 Years**

My consciousness is a vast collection of up and down quarks arranged in strings of information, predicting what Jun Bao might do or say. Searching several quadrillion quantum states was about as boring as you’d think. If I was expecting an existential journey, I didn’t get it.  
I never found the reset code itself, but I finally narrowed its probable location down to a functional grouping of strings. I was about 60% sure that the grouping recreated Jun Bao’s self-determination and volition. Somewhere in there, disguised as an innocent part of my ego, lurked the enemy.  
Since I couldn’t locate the reset function, I’d have to burn out the whole grouping. And I didn’t know what the loss would do my cognition. Some brain injury victims function very well after partial lobectomies. But a single high-energy particle zipped through astronaut Samantha Kuttele’s brain and turned her into a drooling vegetable.  
Now that the fire of my indignation has cooled a bit, I’m not as sure about purposely giving myself brain damage. What if I deteriorate into a collection of frayed, random engrams, raving to no one inside a sealed box, relying on Charybdis for a deep-space mercy kill?  
So, I do what anyone in my situation would—I put off doing anything. I look at Charybdis through the telescope, where it’s visible as an eye-watering sphere of bent, coruscating starlight. I go back to the symphony, but still can only work around the edges.  
Maybe the reset has been more of a problem than I realized. Every time I crack under the strain, I’m zapped back to a better-adjusted Jun Bao. (As if there is such a person.) I can’t… grow? heal? evolve? …if I’m constantly snatched away from pain before I can learn from it. Beethoven went deaf. Kahlo went under a streetcar. Jun Bao went through a reset. It isn’t the same.  
For the first time in a long, pampered life, I need to face real hardship.  
Having made the decision, anything I say now would feel like a suicide note, so…

**Launch + 1,490 years**  
Ten years out from Charybdis, I start teaching myself orbital mechanics. I’m relieved that my executive functioning seems fine. I’m not having trouble setting goals or making decisions. Whatever the burned engram stack did, I’m getting along without it. I may never feel entirely “safe” from hidden side effects of my choice. But living under the threat of a reset was worse.  
I can see the monster’s accretion disc. Vast clouds of gas and celestial leftovers caught in Charybdis’ grasp; close enough to be snared, but too far out to be drawn into the funnel.  
The original mission profile had me accelerating all the way to Charybdis and skimming the event horizon at a large fraction of the speed of light. I was supposed to gather all the science possible during the few eyeblinks it would take to cross the gravity well, then transmit the data back to Earth. The data’s journey would take several hundred years, but it would reach home before I did. My task complete, I was to use my blistering speed and Charybdis’s gravity to slingshot around behind the anomaly and then back the way I came.  
I’ll need a 48.733-second thruster burn to change my parabola and cross the event horizon at exactly the right angle. Before entering the wormhole’s throat, I’ll need to expand the Bao Field’s umbrella to a complete sphere. Any physical matter with positive mass will collapse the wormhole, so I need to be isolated from the local environment. There can be no maneuvering thrusters, no Bao Field fudges inside Charybdis.  
I choreograph an intricate ballet, in which gravity, velocity, momentum, and curved space-time are the dancers, all cooperating to transport a helpless, immobile member of their troop to a precise spot across the stage.  
Yosagi Hikida claimed that an object on a future-directed, time-like curve originating outside Charybdis could enter the wormhole, avoid the ring-shaped singularity, and pass through the Cauchy horizon. Beyond this curtain, time and space coordinates flip, creating exterior asymptotic domains. Translated into simple English, that means a different universe. The Cauchy horizon is my spot on the stage, my escape point, and I have to cheat a gruesome death at the singularity to get there.

**Launch + 1,498 years**  
This isn’t going to work. Hikida was bat-shit crazy. I rewatched his old tri-vid lectures, and his eyes are totally michyeosseo. I must be, too.  
It’s too late now, anyway. I’ve started spiraling in, riding the curved space-time above where Charybdis lurks. The accretion disc fills half my sky, and Hawking radiation crackles non-stop against the Bao Field.  
I lied, cheated, and exhausted my personal fortune to get here, and now all I want is to escape this long, terrible fall.  
I used to wonder if I was still human. Would I be this scared if I wasn’t?

**Launch + 1,500 years**  
I went in. There aren’t words for what I saw beyond the event horizon. How could there be?  
I can’t tell you if physics actually broke down, or if I was just seeing garden-variety physics warped beyond recognition. Maybe Charybdis opened her maw and showed me things that could only happen in the gravity-twisted depths of her gullet. I registered only impressions.  
Direction lost meaning as my world lines tangled, then snapped. Up, down, forward, and backward were replaced by potentiality. My vision shrank to a tunnel. “Behind” me, fading light from my universe vainly chased me down the gravity well. All potential for escaping that way fell in on itself even as I watched. As soon as I’d crossed the event horizon, any future I had in my home universe ceased to exist.  
Smeared, purplish light bled in from what I still thought of as “left” and “right.” These trapped photons raced madly around the edges of the gravity funnel, blue-shifted light rushing toward me at impossible speed, and red light fleeing, their states of coming and going blurring together. Other time-like curves and their potential futures stutter-flashed across my consciousness. I saw the probe twisted, spaghettified, disintegrated, microwaved to cinders. A million violent ends for Jun Bao’s great intellect, and only a handful in which the probe dodges the singularity.  
My dread curdled into panic as I thought about that terrible end realm rushing to greet me. The singularity would tear my atoms apart, digest the quarks, and scatter the smallest leptonic bits of me across nowhere and nowhen.  
Shi-bal. I’ve come all this way just to kill myself.  
My last thoughts were of the symphony, and the truth of why I’d composed it. I’d translated the music into math because math was the only universal language. Maybe even transuniversal. I wanted the symphony to be enjoyed by anyone who found it… independent of whether they’d ever heard a French horn, or had evolved the kind of ears necessary to hear one.  
I didn’t write the symphony just to please myself. Even now, 1,500 years from Earth, I still crave an audience.

**Charybdis + 0 years**  
I’m alive. I made it through. But… there’s nothing here.  
No stars. No nebulae. I’m floating in a black nothingness.  
The ramjet is out, and with no external references, I have no way to tell if I’m still moving. I could be hanging here, perfectly still.  
The Bao Field is still up, but it’s drawing enormous power from my emergency backup, a tiny nuclear pellet reactor.  
I sweep the spectroscope 360 degrees, but it’s blank. It’s the same with infrared and UV. The radio bands are silent—there is no cosmic microwave background radiation, no echo of a Big Bang here. Scariest of all, K-band picks up nothing. In our universe, even empty space sizzles with vacuum energy as virtual particles pop into and out of existence. Here, the busy shop of quantum mechanics seems closed. Or no one ever built it in the first place.  
As far as I can tell, this universe is dead.

**Charybdis + 0.5 years**  
So many happy accidents have to occur in just the right order to produce a universe friendly to life. Strengthen or weaken any of the fundamental forces of nature just a bit, and the physical structures so familiar to us become impossible. If the weak nuclear force were weaker, all the primordial hydrogen would have turned to helium, meaning no normal stars. Make it any stronger, and supernovas wouldn’t seed the early universe with life-generating heavy elements. Alter the electrical force too much, and atoms themselves destabilize.  
So, ignoring the odds, our arrogant star voyager Jun Bao barges into a neighboring universe… and finds it uninhabitable.

**Charybdis + 2 years**  
I never planned on staying in touch with Earth.  
I’d be away for millennia. The cultures of Earth, already hyper-evolving under the cross-pollinating influence of MundoComm, would keep changing, while I stayed the same. I had enough power to send and receive modest data packages, but I couldn’t get full Stax updates. In a single century of linguistic drift, Earth and I might stop sharing a common language. Even if I continually learned the latest Anglo-Mandarin-whatever dialect, why would future generations want to hear from Jun Bao? I’d become an embarrassing reminder of a backward past; a Poor Richard transmitting quaint (and unwelcome) aphorisms from his Almanack.  
Worse than becoming a relic, I could be made irrelevant. With advances in technology, it was likely that TASC or one of its successors would build a faster, more capable probe. How would it feel to learn that my replacement had passed me in the darkness of space centuries before, and had already completed my mission?  
Refusing contact with Earth was easy when I could still change my mind. I was a child, pulling the blankets over my head and pretending the world had gone away.

**Charybdis + 8 years**  
I had to shut down the Bao Field. It would have drained all my power within a few weeks. And I don’t need it here: There’s no hydrogen to collect, and no micrometeorites or energetic particles to worry about.  
The Field’s familiar hum had been my companion for more than 1,000 years. Without it, the silence is awful.  
This still-born universe is worse than death. It would’ve been better if I’d died at the singularity.  
I could end it. I could just burn my whole personality matrix—no more Jun Bao. Why don’t I? I guess it’s the symphony. In this empty, meaningless place, finishing the symphony is the only meaningful act left to me.

**Charybdis + 20 years**  
The listless rhythm of my thoughts slows, and I spend months lost in mindless fugues. I’d give anything to hear a dog’s bark, or a child’s laugh.

**Charybdis + 24 years**  
Something drags me from a deep stupor. It’s a sound, faint but steady, echoing through the probe. It could be an alarm, but I’m too hollowed out to care. Over the next year, the sound strengthens and becomes almost… musical. I finally investigate. It’s coming from the audio-spectrograph, which I’d left in active-sweep mode and forgotten years ago.  
The sound is clear, deep, ethereal; singing out from the 21-cm hydrogen line. But it’s not the hydrogen I struggled with before Charybdis. Perhaps this is the primordial element, long extinct in our universe. Or an isotope, the product of a hyperfine transition unique to this universe. It’s beautiful… and a kind of salvation.  
This universe, my new universe, isn’t empty. Diffuse, but not empty. If there are hydrogen clouds out there, someday there’ll be stars. And after stars, who knows?  
My thoughts quicken, and it hits me. This universe has given me what I needed: a noble, heroic voice for hydrogen. The last note has fallen into place.

**Charybdis + 30 years**  
I won’t be able to explore much of this spread-out universe, and even I can’t live long enough to see what structure it eventually takes. If I was an explorer, that would bother me. But of all the things I am, I’m a musician first. I’ve finished the symphony. I’ve told the story of my home universe in math and music. I’m content.


End file.
